Electronic systems and circuits are often utilized in a number of scenarios to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as computers, video equipment, and communication systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reduction in analyzing and communicating information in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Frequently, these activities involve storage of vast amounts of information and significant resources are expended storing and processing the information. Maintaining accurate replicated backup storage of the information is often very important for a variety of reasons (e.g., disaster recovery, corruption correction, system maintenance, etc.). Various resources organized in a variety of architectures or hierarchies are often relied upon to support and manage storage of data. Managing naming of the resources can be complex and complicated.
Storage resources can be organized in a cluster hierarchy with multiple host nodes. The host nodes can use logical unit number storage resources (LUNs) for storing information. Each host or server can have a different name for each LUN. In a traditional approach in which the same LUNs are exported to multiple servers, if a cluster volume manager is configured across the multiple servers, the LUNs will get different names. FIG. 1 is a block diagram of an exemplary traditional system 100. System 100 includes host node 101, host node 102, and disk array 120 which includes LUNs 121 and 122. Host node 101 refers to LUN 121 as ABC123XYZ345JT3325 and host node 102 refers to LUN 121 as LMN523KJ73348RT7784. Conventional approaches in which a host node can refer to the same LUN by different names can be problematic because if any cluster of hosts is configured where the nodes share the same storage, it can be difficult to figure out that two different names are the same LUN.
Some conventional approaches attempt to use an array volume identification (AVID) based naming scheme, but this approach may also be problematic. This is an additional property to be returned by the array and this is often not supported by many tier 1 class array configurations. Even if support is attempted, the conventional approaches make an assumption that the same set of enclosures are connected across hosts in the cluster. However, if there is a host which is not seeing the same set of enclosures then the names generated on that host are not typically consistent with the other hosts. In addition, even if multiple host nodes coincidentally utilize the same name, conventionally naming schemes typically include numerous bits and are very long making tracking and management of the names difficult.